


C'mon

by Niji_Hitomi_Iscariot



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Angst, Helmsman Sollux Captor, Kidnapping, Light BDSM, M/M, Pale Porn, Psionic Sex, Sol and KK are kinky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 11:40:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7359754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niji_Hitomi_Iscariot/pseuds/Niji_Hitomi_Iscariot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With everything falling all around you, you like to believe in all the possibilities.</p><p>--or--</p><p>In which the empire's mop up crew is forced into confrontation with the insurgents' most powerful ship; the mother fucking Odyssey. A thorn in Karkat's side, but boarding the ship exposes him to his worst fears come to life. Everything the empire knew about the Odyssey is a lie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	C'mon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aewin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aewin/gifts).



> Aewin, you're going to want to smack me, but truly, I couldn't resist. Hope you like it! XD
> 
> And fun fact: I was STILL writing this ON THE TRAIN and IN THE HOTEL ROOM at my biggest convention of the season, literally down to the wire. ((So if you come on any typos, please let me know. x.x I ran out of time.))

==> Karkat: Enjoy your drink.

You are certainly trying to do that, but someone in the corner of the seedy bar where you’ve chosen to spend your meager beetles is belting out “classic” Terran pop songs. Badly. And you are not drunk enough for this.

Where did your battles go? Oh. Of course they are. Fucking humans.

Not a one of them knows the significance of this song, you know that. You haven’t shared that part of your life with anyone. Three different moirails and not a one of them has ever dragged it out of you.

Gamzee came the closest but you have holes in your pan from that evening. You’re pretty sure you didn’t tell him though, and of the three you’ve had since That Night, he would have been the only one who could have understood. No matter how pan-damaged Gamzee himself had been.

So you glare out at the unsinkable douchewaffles belting off-key lyrics in the corner.

John might entertain the ship with his piano but vocally? HA! You hadn’t known Harley’s ears could fold back that far. Her wincing at least pulls a snort from you.

But Dave.

Your infuriatingly perceptive partner-at-arms and third, most capable, moirail.

He’s the one that has your back against the Loyalists. He’s the one whose sword is braced to defend your blind spots. Shoulder to shoulder. He’s a knight in whatever fucked up ranking system the humans have, and according to your superiors that means he’s your equal in pay grade at least.

You don’t give a shit.

Between him and Harley’s cover fire, they proved themselves worthy of their place in your unit. It’s diverse. It’s a clusterfuck sometimes, but fuck, you don’t think you would be comfortable with an all troll unit anyway. Mutations may not be cullable offenses anymore, but that doesn’t stop some people, and with four capable humans at your back, you can at least be assured that you’re not gonna not wake up some morning.

Not waking up…

Yeah, sometimes that’s not quite such a bad idea.

It’s Dave’s voice that gets to you the most, “C’mon, c’mon, with everything falling down around me I’d like to believe in all the…”

“...possibilities…” you whisper in time with the music, clutching your drink tighter.

Jade looks over at you, but you don’t notice. Nor do you notice when she and Rose exchange a glance.

==> Karkat: Remember.

No! This is supposed to be a happy night off!

Your crew pushed the Loyalists back to the Sirius System. It’s a huge win as far as the Empire Coalition is concerned. You’re all getting promoted for this.

Hence why you’re all at this dive bar off Betelgeuse Six anyway.

==> But that’s not quite true, is it?

No, shitty narrator, fuck you very much, but you left him behind on purpose. You were too different. You knew that night nothing would ever work out the way he thought it would.

==> Karkat: Remember!

Well, you are now, goddamnit! No thanks to the fucking insistent, omnipresent asshole with the command prompt powers!

==> Sweeps in the past, but not many.

The twin moons of Alternia hang over a cluster of hivestems, tinting the heat reflective siding pale pink and green. Someone curses at the stars and drunkards sing off-key as they wander. Most trolls are in the middle of lessons either via the net or away from their hives. Atop one building in particular an aged Biclops mindlessly sucks his thumb in an attempt at sleep until a shout makes him jump, wide-eyed and staring at nobody.

==> Be Nobody.

You are not “nobody” and that is a shitty reference. You are Karkat Vantas and you cannot believe the hoofbeastshit that just came dribbling out of your pitch-flush-whatever-mate’s squawkblister.

“Say that again. Slowly. So I can actually comprehend how catastrophically pandamaged you’ve become in the last sixteen hours, you seriously grubshitting imbecilic twofold moron. Not only are you fundamentally underestimating the sheer stupidity of this plan, you are dealing a hand of cluckbird feathers instead of cards in a high stakes game of Highblood Roulette while simultaneously expecting me to just sit back and let you do it! And that’s another thing! How, in the name of G’ylgolb’s second left nutsack did you expect me to react to all this?!”

You pause to take a breath, and he has the nerve to open his mouth.

“No! Your right to contribute to this utterly inane conversation has been revoked until I find what backassward drawer you’ve put your common sense in!”

“Are you done, KK?” He asks like he didn’t just drop the biggest fucking shitbomb he could have ever come up with in your lap.

“No!! I won’t be done until you admit how pannumbingly insane this is! And maybe not even then! Do you not get it? You’re the epitome of bad decisions and this one!? This one right here?! This is the absolute worst of all of your bad decisions, which are, on their own, the worst ideas in the Empire Coalition! That is how bad this idea is!”

He crosses his arms around his thorax and you know you’re getting to him when he looks away. “Yes. Thank you for that astute breakdown. We needed it in case our positions in the Empire were any less obvious than they are.”

You know his sarcasm is a trick; you know it is. You still fall for it every time he uses it.

“Fuck you! I am one skirmish away from E-4! I am forcing them to acknowledge a mutant lowblood! Before you know it, I’ll have enough metal on me to sink to the Condescension’s Abyssal Palace without the aid of a weight-suit!”

“Oh, right, yes, of course, Mr. Threshecutioner. Please,” his lisp grates on your auricular sponge clots in a harsh reminder of just how deeply pitch you are sometimes, “remind me again how you’re allowed to throw your life away but don’t anyone else consider that as one of their pothibilitieth.”

You dig a claw into one aurical shell and blink in faked astonishment. “Wow.”

“What!?” He spits. He’s starting to spark; he’s seething.

“You are not allowed to use that word.”

You know the instant you’ve crossed the line when every hair stands up all down your arms. You mentally play back what you just said, looking for the mistake like you’re combing through code for errors, but he doesn’t give you the chance to retreat.

“Get. Out.”

“Sollux…” you try.

He slams you into the wall next to the door. It flies open and you’re reminded why he’d even be considered for the whole point of your argument in the first place. Of course that slams right up into what you said. But it’s far too late for explanations now. He needs to cool off—and so do you—before he does something he really can’t take back. He knows that threshold better than you do. He’s more familiar with it, having been pushed beyond it against his will twice as an adolescent.

Nobody mentions Aradia around him for a reason.

So you’re out of his hive and already kicking Past You in the shameglobes. You wander for a while, dressed only in your Threshie BDU pants and an undershirt.

It shows off your sweeps of training, both personal and official. One of your battles—or ‘battle buddy’ as Sarge calls them—pointed out that picking up the sickles when you were six meant that you’ve been technically training for over half your life. Given that you’re currently 33 Coalition Orbital Rotations.

About 16 Alternian Sweeps.

You don’t really care as long as it gives you purpose. You survived to adulthood and saw the birth of the Coalition. The least you can do to pay the universe back for that is to be not utterly useless.

Which, now that the chill of the air has cooled your temper, you are realizing is all your quad-mate wants. He can only do so much planetside. Sitting at home while you go off with the I.C.S. Black Curtain. You mop up what’s left of the resistance—old trolls too afraid of change to believe the Coalition can bring anything but the end of the universe—and he stays behind providing tech support to wrigglers that don’t even know which end of a USB biowire plugs into their husktops.

That’s not to say all the older trolls were against it. The alliance was thoroughly supported by the Condesce herself. Having been trapped under the weight of a collection of highblood generals who actually did have the firepower to blow her out of the sky, she leapt at the first chance for freedom she’d found.

And Garfit’s fleet had been the first to fall.

You had been there, on the Curtain, when it happened. History in the making right there, in front of your gander bulbs.

You’d never been so scared in your life.

But Sollux had been left behind. Not much use for tech support on a battleship, and to reveal just how powerful his psionics are was asking for him to be strapped into a ship before the ozone cleared the air. Batteries are always needed.

That’s the crux of it really. You get to go off helping the cause while he’s stuck living a lie, his potential wasted. Useless.

God, you could really throttle Past You right now!

Some asshole stumbles out of an alley, liquor on his breath and a chunk taken out of his shoulder that looks like a bite. Either he’s run afoul of a shadowdropper or somebody else’s lusus. Either way, he lunges, throwing your mind into combat mode and you spin him off your shoulder, your sickle slicing across his throat like psionics through beeswax.

And as he slides to the concrete, nothing more than a meal for the daywalkers, you realize you have to go back. Over the last few sweeps, you’ve been steadily turning more and more into a living deadly weapon and it’s like a sock to the gut that it finally clicks. He’s not just afraid you’ll go off and get killed, he’s afraid _of you_ and what you’re becoming. You have to show him you’re still you! You have to prove it to him so that he forgets about this stupid program!

The culled troll’s shirt works as an excellent cleaning rag, and you’re sprinting back to Sollux’s hivestem as soon as you’ve put your weapon away again.

Pounding on his door, you call, “Sollux! Sollux please! Past Me is always an insufferable douchebag!! I’m sorry!”

It takes a second; a heart-wrenching, throbbing, tears on your cheeks second. But he opens the door, peering up at you through bangs that have grown too long and shaggy to stay pushed back the way he likes. There’s tears on his cheeks too, and the room is trashed when he steps to the side.

He scratches the bicep of one lanky arm, looking at the floor.

You blubber forwards anyways, “I’m sorry! I wasn’t thinking! I didn’t mean it like that and you know I wouldn’t use my rank like that! Sollux, you aren’t just some civvie, you’re my whatever-we-are! I didn’t think! I just spoke, and you know that makes me stupid. God, I’m such a douchebag, how can you possibly pity me, I just—I’m so sorry!”

You want to close the distance between you, but he’s holding himself back, like he doesn’t know what exactly to say, or maybe like he does but he knows you’ll go off again. Fuck Past You with a rusty culling fork, seriously.

“I…” he starts, and shifts his weight from one foot to the other, “I know I’m not just some civvie. I mean, shit, even with you turning into a fucking musclebeast, I can still kick your ass.”

“Yeah, sure, anytime you’re willing to try—”

“I’m not done, KK.” His eyes are bright, focused on you, and that rage from before simmers around the corners in tiny pulses that you know with just the right nudge could become full arcs of power.

The snark dies on your tongue. “Right. Sorry. Shutting up now.”

“I know I’m not just a civvie. Not even to the government. That’s why I told you about it.” He huffs, sparking a little, but you know that for once it’s not at you. “The lie never worked. HIC’s had taps on me since I hatched. She knows about my bipolar. She knows about my psi-scale. She knows I blew up the testing facility when I was eight. Fuck, she even knows about AA! Point is, she fucking knows, okay!? I can’t just sit here pretending to be something I’m not forever, and this is a good opportunity.”

“It’s a fucking panwashing program and you know it!” You can’t help interjecting; you’ve seen the results of that program.

“Not necessarily. Not from what I’ve researched about it.”

You start pacing, because if you don’t, you’re going to scream at him again. This is stupid! This is so stupid! He’s gonna get himself into this and he’s not gonna be able to get himself out, no matter how high on the psi-scale he is, and you’re going to have to watch while the one troll you’ve felt like you could be with for the rest of your nights is strapped into some engine without a shred of his personality left.

A thought runs right down your spine, halting you mid-step, and you turn to him.

Fuck social niceties, and fuck the possibility that he’s going to throw you across the room with his mind. You practically pounce him, gathering all of his sharp edges and hard points into your arms with a deep steady purr that really says more about how scared you are for him than anything else, and you hold him. You rub your rounded off little nubbin of a horn against the outer edge of the longer one closest to you. You’re murmuring something about never letting him go, never leaving him, or some other sappy bullshit like that, but the point is you _aren’t_ ever going to let him go. He’s yours, and you’re his, and he needs very much to be reminded of that right now.

It took the two of you three sweeps to settle on forgetting about the quadrant bullshit. He’s got a diamond and so do you, but neither of you take anyone red or black. You flip between the two with each other too much to justify entertaining anyone in either quadrant, but because of that, you already feel like you’ve lost so much time with him just being stupid wrigglers who couldn’t move past the fact that movies don’t reflect reality as it is, but as mainstream media wishes it was.

You must get through to him because he’s slipping his arms up around your neck and the disaster zone of his mouth is on yours and you’re drowning in his taste. The one advantage to your blunt, nubby horns is the sensitivity is all nice and compact, which means when he does tha~ahhh~t with his thumb near your temple you turn into a veritable puddle of red feelings. Both figuratively and literally because yup that’s your nook. It’s all about make-up sex right now.

Because that’s what you do.

You argue and you either push yourselves black and fuck.

Or you apologize and fuck.

Your nook doesn’t much care. It just wants whatever you’re setting down. You’re flooded with him. From the taste of his tongue and the fork in it to the scent of his skin. The not-quite-taste-scent-feeling from where your horns brush against his. Soft calluses and blunted nails from hours upon hours of coding, except for that one thumb nail that is a veritable talon because he rarely ever uses his right thumb on the keyboard. So of course he uses _it_ on the base of your horn, teasing the fine sensory hairs around it. He’s all over you, overwhelming you.

And well, you can’t have that now can you?

He moans when you spread your hands over his ass, and you suck his much-abused bottom lip into your mouth, purring harder than ever because fuck yes. His eyes do that flutter thing that means he’s trying not to fully unsheathe in his boxers.

Gold is a very difficult color to get out of clothing, and the knowledge that you both are intimately aware of that fact due to how well-experienced you are with trying has you primed to do the same to your own pants.

Between hungry kisses, you convey the need to be naked and a crackle down your arms is a warning you actually heed.

Pushing him back, you shake your head with a breathless, “My uniform!”

The prickle of sparks slips between the fibers of your clothes, dancing around your grub scars and that divot he put there that _the bastard_ **knows** is sensiti—ohfuckshitcocksuckinglittlesonofapinktreewee! You double over, bulge pouring out of your sheathe all in one go that leaves you panting and clinging to the back of a convenient chair.

“What’s the matter, KK?” He lisps.

Oh fuck that lisp. That lisp is the sexiest fucking thing on the whole of Alternia and you need the mouth it’s a part of like you need water!

Fuck him!

You whine, trying to make grabby hands at him as he dances just out of reach, lighting you up again in a knee-buckling shudder of electricity in all the right places.

You would flip black for this level of teasing if not for the literal powerplay involved. You wouldn’t dare trust a kismesis to have this much control over you, for all that you do trust them not to kill you. Now or even more later when he’s wrung you out like so much laundry and you’re lost within yourself. This is just a level of vulnerability that you would never reveal to a rival. It’s a deliberately assumed submission, a deserved weakness that you don’t need to overcome, that you don’t _want_ to overcome. Even if your hypothetical spade understood the freedom and relaxation that comes of putting your entire existence in another troll’s claws, that’s discounting the way you tend to vacillate between red and black mid-session.

Only someone that flip-flops as much as you do can really get it. When this was heading towards sex, you really should have expected it. You—albeit accidentally—held your rank over his head. So he’s returning the favor by fucking you without touching yoo-oooh!

Psionics blow open your nook, reminding you to keep your pan on the present, and dancing along pleasure spots you know he has memorized.

He fucking FILLS you with the shitting energy, deliberately holding you wide open; a bubble of psionic-encased air inflating your seed flap. It puts pressure on the bundles of nerves that separate your nook from your shameglobes, and you can feel them filling at a forced rate from the intrusion. It’s like that one time you fucked Equius. Fuck he was huge!

You’re left gripping the chair for dear life as the hunger to be fucked becomes the urge to piss and blows past it to the edge of spilling all over yourself.

Then he backs off, the bastard!

“Oh y-you dicksniveling, sick ‘panned, tree-humping, fuck mongering, bulge tease whore fuck!”

He fucking smirks, holding your chin as you fail to keep from drooling on him. Your tongue is numb and dry, licking your lips like you could taste him through the distance between you. It amuses him, as you knew it would. He’s got you practically begging for his actual touch! Fuck you, you just wanted to get a little bit back at him. Tease him so he’ll give you what you want without having to actually beg for it.

“If you’re still that coherent, KK, I’ll have to step up my game.”

Oh!

Oh fuck!

Oh what have you done!?

Past You continues to be an utter moron!

He steps back, one hand pulling at his bulge—where did his clothes go?—and flicks the other wrist.

Your head snaps back, another obvious sign this is red, exposing your throat and a psychic hand grips the front while others spread your legs as wide as the crotch of your BDU pants will go, and your arms are bound behind the small of your back. You’re no longer leaning on the chair, and it would take a _far_ STRONGER troll to move against the psionic bonds he’s put on you in.

But of course, this is just the window dressing.

The real meat of it makes you howl!

He redoubles the pressure on your shameglobes, stimulating the already full organs to fill further, and he pinches the end of your bulge so that the overflow can only slosh back into your seed flap and down your legs through your nook. Vaguely you notice Constance and Java burbling at your feet, their gentle mouth nubs sucking at the copious amount of candy red slurry pooling beneath you. But you can’t really process it until one of them climbs your leg under your ruined pants to suck directly on the source.

For good or ill, it misses your nook by a generous nine inches, latching instead onto the tip of your bulge.

You cry out, the pleasure-venom they excrete directly on your sensitive flesh makes your weight sag in Sollux’s grip. He must catch you for the simple fact that you don’t faceplant on the floor, but that’s it. If he’d been hoping for you to beg, he’s not going to get it. It’s just too much stimulation for your body to keep edging your climax.

You come all over everywhere.

The nookworm on your bulge slurps heavily down your pant leg to the floor with a squelching plop, thoroughly sated. And what’s leftover cascades like a carmine waterfall from both nook and bulge in near-painful convulses.

Mentally you are somewhere between a sea cucumber and Gamzee, which means your next flash of awareness is when you’re absolutely drained matesprit-mesis is pouring you both into his double-coon.

You burble about your uniform.

“I shredded it.” He informs you, sounding exhausted.

In response, you blink owlishly at him, trying to summon your rage, “Wha…?”

He sighs, too heavily for post-orgasm, and flops back in the sopor. “Don’t fret. It was ruined. You’ll have a new one come nightfall. Now sleep.”

You have a rant in there somewhere, but the slow twitch of your arm in the sopor is both a perfect illustration of your elocution centers at the moment, and an excellent distraction as your hindbrain registers all nearby movement as noteworthy, even your own limbs.

You wake when he leaves. Just enough to note that it’s still mostly light out. Not fully because before arguing with him you’d pulled four days without sleep just to get back to him, and now that your body has engaged in the activity it’s not about to let you get away with shorting it before your stores are at full capacity.

Capacity.

Like a battery!

The Helmsman Program! Sollux!!

“Fuck!”

The thought jolts you out of your slumber and immediately you realize it’s full dark, you’re alone, and everything is quiet in the way of something missing. It’s hours after you heard him leave. The obvious answer is some nearby wriggler needed hands on help and Sollux left to go provide it.

Yeah, you don’t believe that even as long as it took you to think it.

So, the weight of unwelcome truths is your breakfast companion as you pack up what little you brought with you for your shore leave. You had planned for a perigee. It hasn’t even been one night fully.

It’s eerie without the hum of his apiary and cold without the ozone of his latent static electricity. But what really drives it home is when you climb the hivestem to see Biclopsdad before you go.

You have to be sure to have someone look after him, even if—NO! There is a less than zero percent chance Sollux will wind up in a Loyalist’s helm! You didn’t let yourself think it yesternight, you’re not going to even imagine having to cull him across a battlefield. Except you do. Because you don’t know where he’s training and whether they’ve been infiltrated.

You shove it aside to finish climbing the external stairs, nursing a cup of human coffee. The warm drink freezes to ice in your gastric nutrition chamber when you emerge on the roof.

The lusus is gone.

==> Past Karkat: Be Future Karkat

Fuck.

You never did find out what happened to Sollux’s dad. His shackles had been cut with psionics, and your ex could easily have lifted him down from the hivestem without alerting anyone. There had been no trace of where he’d gone, or anything.

He was just…

Gone.

You scrub at your face, wishing you’d just gone back to your bunk on the Curtain instead of coming out with the humans. Your drink is warm, your pumpbiscuit is cold, and you’re done with being social for the night. Harley and Lalonde can party like it’s Twelfth Perigee’s Eve if they like, but you’re done.

You slip a credit chip worth more than twice what you owe—to make up for exposing the rest of the bar to your battles—and make for the door. Strider tilts his head at you over his glass, the neon lights flickering over the dark lenses of his neural-uplink, and you give him a small upnod of your chin.

Of them all he gets it.

His matesprit took a hard one to the thorax a sweep ago, and has been sidelined indefinitely. It’s an advantage over you. Dirk will never have to face the prospect of staring down his plasmasword at Jake.

You still have no idea where Sollux is.

Dave finds you later, but in his infinite wisdom, which he keeps carefully hidden away from the others, he doesn’t press you for answers. He just gives you the palest kiss possible. He knows you’ll come to him when you want to talk about it. It’s part of how the two of you work. He doesn’t demand every detail from your life before the Coalition, and you respect that he doesn’t talk about what it was like growing up in the Strider Program.

Somenight you’ll both share everything.

But not tonight.

Everyone you work with, both of you, collectively agrees that you two never shut up. His Coolkid™ façade includes rambling off in freestyle rhymes and elaborate, often nonsensical, metaphors, and you can drop a rant that goes on long enough to burn even the most pan-damaged soldier’s ears with your caustic language. You’re infamous enough that when your diamond went public, people made a joke about red miles and implying that your feelings jams would never end.

Someone even rewrote The Song That Doesn’t End to parody your pale.

They only sang it once.

But usually you both just laugh it off, you with a little more spite than him. Because after three sweeps together, you both know the truth.

Like tonight.

It’s nearing 0600. Lights out time. The bars are closed, the dayshift humans are already clocked in for their jobs, and most of the sensible trolls, the ones that don’t suffer from severe chronic insomnia, are already passed out in their recuperacoons. Not you, of course, because you still routinely end up pulling multiple days without sleep, but it sets the tone for your shiphive.

Mostly, it’s just quiet.

He turns your husktop off, powering it down, and closing the lid while you stare, somewhat blankly, at the desk, only half-registering that he’s doing it.

You don’t exactly know what you were thinking when you wandered into your bunk. Some vague notion of scouring the net for traces of your ex? Yeah, probably, given that you can’t get him out of your pan at the moment. But as usual, you didn’t turn up anything, which led to mindless scrolling through old chat logs and the movie critic blog you ran as an adolescent, and driving yourself deeper and deeper into depressive nostalgia.

You really should learn to let go of the past at some point.

Dave takes your hands, pulls you to your feet, and kisses you again. Your breath hitches. He tucks his fingers into your hair, rubbing gently at the bases of your horns. You cough on your purr and he strokes all the way up to the tip. It would be less pale if he didn’t take his shades off, but he’s blessedly bare and open to you when you look at him. He curls a lock of your hair behind your ear, and takes your hands in his again.

“C’mon,” is all he says.

He leads you to the ablution chamber your squad shares, through the door at the back of your hive rather than through the hall, for which you’re grateful. Even if you can’t summon the ability to actually feel that at the moment.

The water is warm against your skin before you’re aware that he’s helped you strip.

His hands find your horns again, circling and stroking while lathering mane wash in your hair. It’s thick and fruity, some kind of ironic “girly” scent that he hates on himself but loves to use on you. He’s shorter than you now, though at the start of this your positions were reversed. So, he gently pushes on your shoulders until you’re kneeling and he can get your head under the faucet. Water cascades down your face. You blink it out of your eyes to watch the swirls in the drain, and Dave moves onto rubbing carapace oil into your shoulders.

You hiss when he reaches the myriad scars criss-crossing your back. Each one was earned, though not entirely for just reasons all the time. Your early days in the Threshecutioners were a montage of humiliation and abuse.

The perfect soldier had no sense of self, he dedicated his whole to the good of the corps.

It was another one of those things that you and Dave shared. Where Dirk had been implanted with neurotransmitters and connected at the subatomic level via nanobots to the Coalition mainframe for his electronic expertise; you and Dave had both gone through what could only be described as near-death physical endurance training. Running for days with only water; fighting your fellow recruits until your hands bled and your legs gave out; and on the few nights you’d been allowed to sleep… it was more likely than not you’d be thrown out of your coon for a mid-sleep skirmish against other squads of trainees from other branches of the military—as opposed to other Threshies.

Some didn’t make it. Before the alliance formed the Empire Coalition your superiors spun a tale that you’d be sent to “retirement planets”. No one below olive believed it for a second. There was no such thing as retirement in the Alternian Empire. You either died on the job, or they culled you. Especially lowbloods.

Especially mutants.

Dave’s hands on the thirteen hashmarks running down one side of your lower back brings you out of your memories. You scratch the wall as he presses harder with the oil. You know he gets it. He’s got his own after all.

The Strider Program sounded like Basic, from what little you know of it. Dirk told you once that Dave had been strung up as an example in the Texas sun any time he let his mouth get the better of him. Judging by how he still runs it all the time, you can only imagine how often that happened. And his scars support the idea. It probably contributes to why he’s quiet when you’re alone. He talks constantly in front of John and Jade so they don’t know anything’s wrong, and if he’s going to keep up with Roxy, Jake, or Rose then he has to have a near-constant dialogue going. Hell, in the beginning, he even rambled on with you in the hopes that all you would see was the insufferable douchebag Coolkid™ that he tried to pretend he was. It’s probably some stupid human pale-slut thing; trying to put on a brave face. You have no idea.

The only thing he’ll say about it though is how friendly crows can be when you see them often enough.

You’re bent over, leaning on the wall when his mouth covers a gunshot scar on your hip—he was there for that one—and you meet eyes as he coaxes you to stand again. It always strikes you that you’re looking at yourself in human form when you see his eyes.

For the first time in your life you are so, _so,_ pale for your diamond. Not even Gamzee felt this pale.

It’s because Dave doesn’t expect anything; just your affection and attention.

You reach down to run your claws through his hair, slick from the water and oil, and he kisses the inside of your knee just above the surgery scar that put your leg back together again. He’s doing that thing where he worships every wound you’ve ever received, massaging the tissues with both fingers and tongue. How he can stand the taste of the Carapacian oil, you will never know, but he claims it’s like peppermint after it’s been on your skin.

The very act blurs the line between pale and flushed, but you’ve learned some very important things about how your pan processes quadrants since those first flailing attempts with Sollux. Dave calls you “troll gay” whatever that means.

So you’re fine with it when he traces a knife scar—the steel kind, not plasma—up the inside of your thigh to your hip. It’s not enough to tease your bulge out; it’s not flushed enough. But your nook is interested and Dave is more than happy to kiss and lick you open slowly. This is about grounding you in the present, distracting you from old bonds that haven’t been active in sweeps, so that you relax enough to sleep during your down time.

None of you—the crew of the Black Curtain—know when you’ll be back at it. So you have to take advantage of the peace while you have it.

He works a finger into your nook, centering your awareness on the gentle slide, and you lean back against the wall for balance. It doesn’t take long for you to start dripping and Dave Strider is DAMN good with his hands. You orgasm down your thighs with a soft groan. Your bulge never gets involved because pale sex rarely involves that sort of penetration. It’s more about relaxation than release.

And right about now you’re ready to melt into a puddle of troll right where you stand.

Warm water once again rouses you as Dave rinses you off, rubbing down your legs with the tingling tree oil soap he typically uses himself. Then he has a fluffy towel in your face, mopping your skin and deliberately feeling up your horns again to start your purr box.

You can’t help it. You feel good for the moment.

In return, you drape yourself over him, purring right into the top of his head the way you know he likes.

Without dislodging you, he takes you back to your bunk through that back door, and all the way to your coon. It’s not a real, open, sopor-filled recuperacoon like you had as a wriggler, but the alternasopor that insulates the sides is just as good. It hangs from the ceiling, wraps you in cool safety, and the inner membrane is just thin enough to allow for the anti-daymare properties to be effective without the need to wash off first. Something that aids you when you have to bolt out of your bunk, half-dressed and sickles drawn, ready for battle.

Which is exactly what happens four hours later when the proximity alarm blares through the station and all the docked ships.

You lurch to your feet, out of the coon and barely have your eyes open before you slap the comm button on your desk, “Status, Harley!”

“Three cruisers off the port docks. Fourteen bays lost. They got a lucky shot on somebody’s warp core. The overload did more damage than their warhead. Bravo Six through Nine are engaged, we’ve been ordered to hang back. The Snowman is flanking for cloaking devices. Nepeta estimates six hundred lost in the initial explosion with more accounts coming in.”

“Shit.” You fume, shoving a shirt on over your sleepwear. “Were you out at the helm, Harley? What the hell? It’s like you wanted me to sleep through this.”

Her silence is telling, even as you transfer her to your wrist comm, and feel her direct the Curtain out of her docking bay.

Punching the access panel to the bridge, you glare at the dog-eared woman gripping the helmsball in both hands. As soon as the view across the bow is all stars you growl.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

She scowls back at you, still pretending that leaving the dock takes all of her attention.

“Harley…” you warn.

“Don’t say I didn’t try, fuckass!” She curses until the air around her is black, then grits her teeth, “The flagship this time is the Odyssey.”

“Fuck!” Your signature curse lights up the rest of the ship, alerting your crew to the fight.

Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. So you’re the captain of this fucked up mish-mash circus sideshow. So what!? It wasn’t like anybody else was going to step up when the Loyalists pinned you down outside Vega 4 and strung up Rufioh like a Terran party game. You never actually thought Past You would ever be right about something, but the ragtag survivors of the Meteor Incident won’t answer to anyone else.

Personally, you blame Lalonde. Both of them.

But in the sweeps since the lot of you have proven damn near infallible, and you have to credit that to the way the crew listens to your orders. Just as they trust you to support them with a plan. Especially against a foe like the Odyssey.

Fucking hell! Why’d it have to be the fucking Odyssey!

Once you considered her captain to be one of your closest friends, but the wrath of angels was a victory song to a homicidal nihilist douchebag set on keeping the status quo in the worst way possible.

Horrorterrors take the damned Odyssey!

And her bulgefucking captain!

You punch the comm link as soon as your crew is mostly in position, and you know he hears you because the radio static you always get crackles back at you. “Fuck shitting hell, Goreline! What the actual fuck do you want?! Have you NEVER heard of a vacation, you feculent sack of junglehumping dickprince!”

Hailing the Odyssey only ever affords you one of two things, a retro-hipster quote about how useless your argument is in a recording of his voice at fourteen sweeps, or silence and static—an open comm with no voices.

Rose takes her place at the controls—mostly so you don’t damage them irreparably. Again. And she almost looks sorry for you keep trying to get the actual bastard himself to respond. She knows how dearly you hope you can get through to the troll that had been your friend so long ago.

“I don’t believe using his chosen title has had any effec—”

A pop cuts her off, and you hold your breath. Maybe this time?

“In the words a the former High Tyranny, Justice nevver takes a vvacation, Kar.”

Nope. Yet another pre-recorded sentence spliced together from bits and pieces of the past. It’s not actually Eridan, and your pan jumps to all of the horrible possibilities as to why he never actually talks to you; each one more gut churning than the last.

But there’s something off about this one.

It took too long to respond. Like Eridan was putting it together specifically to answer you just now, like Dave’s music. The Strider brothers seem to agree as a ripple of angry confusion sweeps across the bridge. You have enough people in your crew that personally interacted with him that there’s no doubts you’ve been deceived. Whoever is manning the Odyssey right now, it’s not Eridan Ampora.

“Jade, run the ID program again.” Dirk slips his fingers along the earpiece of his shades, a pale magenta shimmer gives away how fast he and Hal are going over your previous encounters with the Odyssey.

You know he’s comparing this recorded message to the others to try and find a signature, possibly a hint as to what happened that made the change.

“ID confirmed, DiStri.” Roxy reads it from the printout, as Jade guides the Curtain high and wide—out of plasma warhead range but within comm and visual uplinks.

“Odyssey, Nova class intergalactic battle cruiser. Registration: Ampora, Eridan C. AKA Goreline the Huntress. No anomalies detected. Odyssey behavior matches all previous encounters.”

Hal’s electronic voice from Dirk’s mouth used to creep you out, but you’ve accepted that the older Strider twin is simply as much Hal as Dirk anymore. His pan is so integrated with the AI that the only discernible difference between the two is the shimmer of color over the dark lenses that double as his view screen.

“So… what are you saying?” John asks, betraying his internal anxiety by running his hand around the grip of his graviton warhammer.

How the fucking thing stays on his belt without pulling his pants down you can only attribute to Egbert shenanigans.

Dirk turns slightly, a tilt to his head that perfectly illustrates your incredulity. “Please be advised that this is merely conjecture.”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it, bro.” Dave sounds as uncomfortable as you feel.

Dirk hesitates.

“Out with it, Strider.” You sigh, flopping into your chair.

“It is possible. That we have not once ever actually dealt with the real Eridan Ampora, and that this imposter has, in fact, always been the captain of the Odyssey, using the guise of your previous acquaintance in a bid to get under your skin, thus tricking you into coming out in the open where the Loyalists could eliminate our threat once and for all.”

John’s confused. You can tell he puts together the strategy behind it. It’s a good plan. Something worthy of the Ampora name, you’ll definitely give it that. But he has the same question you do.

“How can the ship be registered to Eridan if he’s never been the captain? The biotech wouldn’t work with anybody else because of the blood-signature.” He turns to you for answers because you are the epitome of troll information to him.

You roll your eyes, and are thankfully preempted by Kanaya. “It is possible to forge the blood-signature by simply obtaining some of the intended captain’s blood.”

John shakes his head, frowning, “But the signature has to be re-integrated at every disembarking, and every ship needs to dock somewhere at some point! They’d have to keep Eridan on board and keep taking his blood to keep bonding with the ship!”

Everyone on the bridge looks at him, and John wilts, looking green around the edges as the full implications of what that meant clicks in his head. Either Eridan is indeed being kept prisoner on the ship, and therefore tortured to obtain his blood-signature to maintain the registration in the Imperial database. Or…

There is one other way to get around the blood-signature, but only one type of troll can do it. One that your ship doesn’t have. Because _they_ never leave the ship, and your crew values their freedom over anything—everything—else.

You turn your attention to the monitor keeping track of how the fight is going, swallowing down a mouthful of bile.

Outside your fighter squads are swarming to get through the Odyssey’s shields, to take out her sister ships. To beat back the Loyalist incursion. Six looks the most successful, their area of space is entirely clear so the station’s maintenance and emergency responders can triage the damage. Eight is missing half of their skippers. Seven is behind the curve of the station. Nine is plowing through the middle of what used to be the flight of tiny ships the Loyalists use as a distraction. One through Five are sweeping the rest of the system behind the Snowman for other lurking Loyalist ships. Twelve are the messengers. As soon as the Odyssey’s allies joined the fight, Twelve was dispatched to alert the Coalition. They’ll be halfway to Alternia and Earth by now. But…

Eleven is the mop up crew. Eleven is made up of a single ship. The Curtain.

You grit your teeth, a low growl cutting through their continued argument over Eridan’s identity, and they focus on you, looking for your orders. “Get me on that ship.”

“WHAT?!” Jade and Dave echo to either side of you.

“You heard me, douchewaffles.”

It’s obvious neither is happy with you but John gives you a look like he knows what you’re thinking right before he puts those warhammer muscles to work. The Curtain drifts on Betelgeuse’s wind, lifted and controlled through John’s hands on the solar sails. As opposed to the engine. It’s a backup guidance system in case your helmsman on duty—any of the four of them—passes out from overexertion.

On most ships they’re painted with gold to process the power faster, and they literally only use them in the case of psionic burnout. But the Curtain didn’t get her name just from putting Loyalists’ lights out. No, John’s sails are black, invisible against the backdrop of space and four times as capable of storing power.

They’re also silent and leave no ion trail. Which means you don’t need any sort of cloaking system to hide and surprise your enemy. The Curtain slips through gravity thermals like she was born in space—Dirk, Equius, and Roxy have every reason to be proud of her and all of her glory. She’s a sleek, deadly, undetectable predator.

And you may or may not have had cerulean defectors in mind when you demanded the removal of the cloaking system.

You did grow up with Vriska after all.

John shifts his weight, aligning the levers that direct the sails to bring the Curtain up under the Odyssey. She’s chasing scouts, trying to use her plasma cannons to vaporize Nepeta’s laughsassins. She doesn’t fare well. The tiny arrow-class ships are just too small and the Loyalists are outnumbered.

You observe for a moment while John gets your airlocks lined up. Either Eridan’s imposter has lost his edge, or he _wants_ you to board him. It doesn’t bode well for the likelihood that your former friend is on board, but you don’t have the time to really pick apart why this whole attack feels wrong.

“We’re in.” Roxy chimes over the comm; her stealth trolls appear and disappear as though space itself bent around them.

You know she’s already clearing the halls of the Odyssey.

“Kanaya, Dave, you’re with me. The rest of you, this is capture and disable. No killing if we can help it. Fuck only knows what kind of trap we’re walking into and I want everybody on their best.” Your sickle is in your hand before you even leave the bridge.

But nothing could have prepared you for boarding Eridan’s ship.

Roxy tries to stop you, but knows better when you’re wearing that glare. She catches Dave’s hand though, and you register the way both he and Kanaya tense.

No matter.

You cross into the Odyssey, stalking in a low ready. It’s quiet in an achingly familiar way.

The stench of blood and decay hits you first. It clings to the walls, the floor. Charred and melted humps of what used to be trolls start to litter the halls as you climb out of the cargo areas. The doors to the personnel bunks are half blown out of their frames and half welded shut. Bulkheads and wall paneling bear scorch marks, arcing from one side to the other in clear ricochets.

By the time you reach the hallway to the bridge your whole ship is aware that the Odyssey’s helmsman suffered a severe burnout. Something along the lines of an overloaded Tesla coil. Dave mutters in your ear; an out loud reflection of an internal turmoil trying to beat back the memories of stress and survival. You have to agree with his assessment that the poor civvies and slaves forced to endure the attack never stood a chance.

You almost wish it was still happening so you don’t go through with seeing a ghost of your sort of, maybe, ex. But your luck has never been that good. If you were honest with yourself you would admit that you knew what you were walking into before you even set foot on the ship.

The question about whether Eridan had ever been in control of the Odyssey once again echoes through your pan as you pick your way over the increasing number of corpses.

The Odyssey is built with Hair Force One in mind. Her crew quarters protect the bridge, helmscolumn, and captain’s suite. The lower the rank, the closer to space. And slave pens lined the floor below the cargo hold. The walls are insulated with ancient biowires wrapped in synthetic bulgeskin the color of the captain’s blood—in this case, violet. The blood-signature is to ensure that the biotech doesn’t try to attack the insulation, and accidentally rip a hole to space in the hull.

You’d make a joke about fucking the ship if you weren’t so disgusted by it, and if the Curtain didn’t have orange and blue wires wrapped in candy-mutant-human red. It chases you off the ship every time Dirk or Equius has to run physical repairs.

The point, however, is that as you try to delay the inevitable, you are reminded of just how fucked up your culture was before the Coalition. The use of slaves and low ranks to bodily protect the captain and cargo speaks blatantly to the worth of material versus the worth of young trolls.

It’s gut churning and a small part of you wonders how Eridan could get himself mixed up in all of this. The thought makes you unconsciously shift closer to your moirail.

He gives you a shoulder bump to let you know he’s with you, but he needs both hands on his sword. He’s one of the few in your crew that still wields actual forged steel. So the weight of it requires a two-handed grip to swing effectively.

You’re lucky in that your sickles are dual-hand as opposed to two-hand. So you have one free to palm the door to the bridge.

Oh yeah, lucky you!

The wall and the door, just like the rest of the corridor is covered in grime; burned and electrified remains of other unlucky trolls. Slaves that were thrown into harm’s way in a futile effort to save their masters. It smears as the computer finally recognizes your presence.

Acce22 code?

You cringe. The quirk confirms what you’ve been dreading.

Dave’s hand tells you he’s sheathed his sword and he murmurs near your auricular shell. “This is a ghost ship, Kitkat. It probably always has been.”

“Yeah? Then why here? Why now? If not ‘cause we just got back?” You growl at him and glare darker. “Eridan was a taintchafing ecoterrorist but he was a friend at one point and if he’s got a rogue helmsman in control of his ship, it’s our job to mop up the bullshit it’s causing. Even if,” you throat catches, “if the only bullshit left is the helm itself.”

Dirk chimes in through the comm link in Dave’s shades, “But you know Dave is right. You don’t have to hunt down every ghost yourself.”

There’s an awkward pause before he adds, “captain.” that tells you he’s missing the social conventions for how to be your friend while still maintaining command protocol.

The prompt on the door’s access panel remains, the cursor blinking at you in askance.

Acce22 code?

You growl again, and re-focus on it. “Vantas Sierra Indigo Golf November One Three Two Two. Command override Imperial Six Niner Bravo.”

The door beeps acceptance of your code and swooshes open with a small pool of water at your feel and a cloud of stale air.

Predictably the smoking ruins of the command console tells the story of how the ship came to be deserted. Where Eridan is or if he ever got off the ship alive is uncertain, but in the flicker of exposed wires a pair of sightless eyes glows out at you; one red, one blue.

He’s hanging there. Violet biowires infesting his body like they grew from him rather than the other way around. He’s emaciated, horns dull, and badly in need of both maintenance and upgrades. He’s a derelict fossil of an age long gone. Not even his own ancestor operates under such conditions anymore. It’s really no wonder his psi shorted out like that. So far Dirk’s right, if Eridan was ever on the ship it was only in the beginning. This is a ghost ship, and Sollux is the ghost.

“Kitkat…” Dave cautions.

You shake him off, compelled towards him like he’s pulling you in with his psionics. Vaguely you note that Kanaya holds Dave back, and you’re grateful for the moment, even if neither of them really get it. Kanaya knew there had been _something_ between you when you were younger, but like most of your wriggler friends, she assumed that when Ascension Day hit you broke it off just like you had with Gamzee. And right now there’s no time to explain that as much as you and he had both agreed that it was a good idea, you just couldn’t bring yourself to do it. Either one of you.

And now here he is, hanging in front of you like your darkest daymare come to life.

You know better, but you still reach out, your sickle clatters to the floor. It’s eerily quiet, like the inside of a tomb, and you know better. Psionic burnout is nigh-impossible to come back from. And yet.

And yet.

His quirk.

The attacks and running of the ship can be chalked up to protocol and the Helmsman Program. It’s designed so that the batteries can fly their ships brainless, especially as coppers tend to not come out of the program able to put sentences together. Golds are usually more resilient than that though. It’s part of their natural affinity for electricity. Still, after a burnout, a gold can continue to be used as a battery and navigational computer due to the sheer depth of programming helmsmen go through before stepping up to the block. As long as you have dampeners to siphon off the excess, a burnt out psionic can continue to channel the ship for thousands of years, especially a gold helmsman.

But.

His quirk.

There was no reason for his quirk to show up in command prompts. Especially command prompts after the kind of psionic backlash that ravaged this ship. You’ve never seen a burnout this bad. The whole crew in what had to be a single wave of raw psychic energy. He can’t possibly have the ability to even process your voice. It has to be his programming. It has to be.

Still.

His quirk.

“Sol… lux?” Your voice is the softest you’ve ever heard it. Choked with dust, you tell yourself.

Just as your fingers are about to brush his skin, the lights of his eyes brighten, an arc current running up his horns. You flinch back, wary of discharge, but there isn’t one. You have the strangest feeling of being watched.

“Sollux?”

Very slowly, the crust of sweeps of tears and blood cracking and flaking off, the muscles of his eyes tighten, like he’s focusing on you through his biological eyes the same way he would through a camera lens.

“Sollux? C’mon, nooksniffer, I know you’re in there. There’s no way you’d let these assmunchers burn you out to the point of incoherency. You’re stronger than that. You’re more of an asshole than that.” You have to swallow to get your words out, and you step closer, ready to actually touch him to try and get a reaction.

It’s a stupid move. You know that. You hear Dave inhale sharply when he realizes what you’re doing. Touching any helmsman when they’re jacked in is tantamount to suicide, but laying hands on a burnout is asking to be fried like the lumps of former-troll you stepped over on your way in.

His eyes track you.

It’s something at least.

“C’mon, Sollux. Say something. Show me you’re still there.”

The screen to your right jumps and flickers to life: 2omethiing

“HA! Sarcastic fuckass! I KNEW you were in there!” You’re practically vibrating where you stand. “We’ll get you out! I swear! I have the best fucking mechannihilators in the whole Coalition.”

There you go. Braggiing agaiin. When you gonna learn you aiin’t 2hiit.

“Never if it keeps you talking, you son of a wrinkled sea cucumber!” You could hug him. You could kiss him!

IIt’2 not goiing two work.

“What? Bull fucking shit it won’t work. I have Zahhak on my crew! He and Lalonde BUILT our helm from scratch on a backasswards meteor out of skinned treewees and everybody’s fucking saliva. If ANYBODY can jack you out, it’s them! Even if I have to fucking send the goddamned sci-fi wannabe AI in after you to make sure we got all your pieces! Shit, we’ll build you a new fucking body if we have to! We are getting you out of the motherfucking Odyssey!”

II am the Ody22ey.

“No! No you aren’t! Your name is motherfucking Sollux Captor and you’re the strongest fucking psionic since the first one! NO!” You’re shaking as he repeats the statement, over and over. “NO! NO!! I won’t! I’M NOT GONNA LEAVE YOU HERE!! GOD DAMNED ILLCONCEIVED MULCHLICKER! **PLEASE!** ”

You only register Dave’s hands on you as he pulls you back because his shooshing is soft in your ear. “We’ll get’im out, Kitkat. Shooosh. We’ll save him. Dirk’s already on it. And we gotta get back. C’mon.”

His guiding hand gets you out of the ship and back to your own without you really focusing on it. Everything is a blur. All of your worst fears. Everything you were terrified was going to happen to your quadmate. He’s nothing but a battery, a soulless, limp corpse. His life is sustained only by the very wires that drain his psionics to power the ship.

You are little more than the same over the next week.

John, your first officer, takes over, and you only know that because he submits reports that chime your datapad every night. You read enough of them to know that Nepeta led your Arrowships to victory, the Loyalists aboard the Odyssey’s sister ships are in custody, the Odyssey herself has been towed into a hangar bay where Equius, Dirk, and Roxy can get at her to dismantle her helmscolumn.

And Her Imperious Condescension is on her way.

You should be more concerned with that. You should be out of your pan with worry about your presentation, about your breakdown in the middle of a skirmish. You’re not. Instead, you find yourself wandering down to the hangar where the Odyssey is chained down. They have to treat her like she’s the flight risk she is, but all you can see are more shackles on the troll you’ve only just realized you still flush so, _so_ , hard.

It’s slow going and you find yourself irresistibly drawn to the hangar as much as you try to avoid it; spending hours just sitting on the catwalk suspended above the Odyssey’s hull.

Sollux’s hull.

You haven’t tried to talk to him again, but you watch.

You watch as they pull the pieces of the outer hull off. You watch as Dirk uses Hal’s heightened senses to strip away extraneous bundles of biowires, lengths of cord and cable that he assures you aren’t vitally important to maintaining your—Sollux’s—mental capacity. And you continue to watch as Equius cuts through the ruined metal, praying that ships don’t feel pain, that he isn’t aware of whole corridors of him being aggressively removed. You know that if the ship was any less damaged, and if you weren’t you, the Coalition would simply retrofit his current setup, upgrade him where he hangs and re-designate the whole ship with a new name, new serial number, new captain. But you’re you, so Roxy runs herself sleep deprived trying to hack into Sollux’s mind, attempting to separate troll from ship from the inside the same way the others are going at the outside.

Dave pulls you away from the process more often than you’d like to admit.

Usually he challenges you to a strife and works you to the point of mental exhaustion, but John can’t play acting captain forever, and some things are simply too important to leave in his hands for long.

So over the next perigee you settle into something of a routine, and nobody asks when the Curtain is leaving. For the duration of the Odyssey Project, you are assigned to Betelgeuse Six. As the Condesce gets closer, you find yourself in conference with Her, updating Her with progress reports, particularly if one of your mechannihilators has made any sort of breakthrough.

It’s during one of these that Nepeta bursts into your office.

“KARKITTY! COME QUICK!!” She slams her hands on your desk, her rumblespheres bouncing in your face and making the image on your holoscreen jump and flicker.

“What the shell was that, Krabbae?” Condy’s voice crackles through the speaker and Nepeta bounces back, both hands on her mouth like she’s going to be culled if she so much as breathes.

You rub a temple, “That was my chief laughsassin. She’s incredibly excitable, Ma’am.”

“Oh HAY! Dat’s dat little catfish you was shellin’ me aboat last time you was here? Hay, Catfish, how’s it hangin’!?”

You obligingly turn the holoprojector’s camera so Condy can see Nepeta, and yes, yes you are incredibly amused at the way she shrinks back when face to face with the empress for the first time. Condesce is definitely a sight. Her fins have more bling than a sky full of diamonds. And Her mouth. You have to admit even you almost lost bodily control of your waste functions the first time She smiled at you. That many teeth should not fit in that size mouth without more biting and lisping.

So yes, you take a sick pleasure in being able to scare the living pants off of your cohorts with how close you are to Her.

“Anyway, Krabbae, I gee tee gee. Eych em yoo when ya get back. Don’t do no-fin I wouldn’t do~!” She warbles her last vowel sound in a way that was both teasing and confusing sweeps ago, but now just makes you roll your eyes.

You give a small sigh, shutting down the holoscreen, and turn your full attention to Nepeta. “You sounded urgent. What is it?”

“Y-y-you… that was… HOLY MACKEREL!”

Wincing, you hold up a hand, but you know she’s already vibrating through her words, punning almost incomprehensibly, and yeah, this is the downside to scaring your crew with your closeness to the empress. You are the Eleventh Hour, the curtain that falls on the enemies of the Coalition. How it goes over your pan-numbed crewmembers that your chain of command begins and ends with Her Imperial Condescension, you’re not quite sure. But every single one of them has done this same thing.

Nepeta is still babbling about some romantic nonsense and how intensely “furry-ous” she is with you for keeping something like this a secret. Because “reely Karkitty” how dare you keep the highest level of secrecy with your commander. You apparently should have felt “obli-cat-ted” to share it with “ev-furry-one”. It’s only “fur”. Frankly, she’s making your sleep deprivation headache that much worse with all her “furry-ing” and caterwauling. Yes, that one was yours.

It amuses you when the sound of your hand slamming on the desk makes her jump a foot in the air.

Schooling your features into something more professional, you level her with your most patient scowl. “Nepeta. You interrupted for a reason. What the ever living fuck is so important that you ignored both Zahhak AND Dave’s warnings to NOT do what you just did?”

“OH! C’mon, c’mon! You gotta see this!!” She drops the puns entirely in favor of hauling you bodily out of your desk—holy fuck that cat is strong!

In fact you barely get your feet under you as she drags you down the hallway towards an all-too-familiar hangar bay.

“Honestly, what the grubshitting fuck is going on, Nepeta!” You growl at her, straightening your uniform jacket—she didn’t even give you the chance to take it off before hauling you off.

“You just have to see it! I can’t. I literally can’t!”

She slams the button with a force that makes you wince for Equius’ sake, and in a word the hangar is in chaos. Psionic dampeners surround a mass of undulating violet biowires that drip lubricating fluid all over the floor like a seadweller orgy. It nearly makes you balk at the implications, because it’s very clearly the helmscolumn and a significantly cornered off slave cage. The wires look like they’ve _grown_ around it, looped over and over until they form a barrier between this particular pen and the rest of the ship. And you mean that literally because through the combined efforts of Dirk, Equius, Roxy and their teams, the entire rest of the Odyssey has been dismantled. It lies in burned and plasma-cut pieces all around the hangar bay, organized into useable and recyclable piles.

Dirk spots you first, likely due to Hal connecting to the overhead cameras. He crosses the distance to fall in step with you as you approach the dampener tape on the floor.

“Strider, explain.”

“The shortest answer is that the helm was commanded to fabricate a protective layer around the occupant of this pen. A protocol that he has continued to obey even as his primary neural dock deteriorated.”

“That could only have been ordered by…”

“Precisely why we felt it important to bring you into the fold.” Equius rumbles from your other side, his voice muffled by a protective mask. He has gloves pulled all the way up to his shoulders, and his own dark lenses flicker at the edges with up-to-the-minute analyses of the biowire cocoon. “At your command, Captain.”

You inhale deeply.

He has to slice through active biowires to remove the remaining metal. This could potentially cause Sollux pain. You don’t know how sensitive the conduits are this close to the troll himself, but there isn’t any other option really. You have to extract Sollux as far from the Odyssey as possible before downloading him back into his body, and if you’re right about the contents of this slave pen, the whole reason the Odyssey went rogue in the first place could have been placed on the wrong troll.

You hold your breath, half afraid of what will happen and half disgusted at yourself for hesitating.

“Karky?” Roxy looks down at you from atop her hover desk. She has her visor just like the other two, getting immediate results from the internal systems supporting your recovered flush crush.

Looking down, your hand on the bridge of your nose, you give a sharp nod. Before you can second guess yourself further, you command, “Do it.”

And the sound of Kanaya’s chainsaw echoes through the hangar.

It’s a tense moment. You expect there to be screaming, or something. But other than a soft squelch of tentacle like coils hitting the plasticrete decking, the hangar is silent. Anticipatory. The quiet hangs in the air with the expectation of an egg hatching.

You can’t watch after the first layer because you keep expecting to hear his actual voice, and you don’t want to know if he’s lighting up the datascreens. Nobody says anything about it if he is, for which you’re grateful, but still nervous about it. You’re not sure which would be worse, actually hearing him scream, or seeing it written out as he screams internally. And you can’t even entertain the idea that it doesn’t hurt. How can it not hurt?! He’s literally connected to the wires all over the biowire mass, and Kanaya and Equius are literally cutting into him with chainsaw and hands. It’s just impossible to not be painful in some fashion.

Squeezing your eyes shut you have the memories of your wriggler romance playing through your pan. His smile, his snark, his lisp. Fuck, you miss it. That fucking endearing lisp of his. What you’d give to hear it again.

“Karkat.” Kayana calls your attention to the fact that the chainsaw has stopped.

You blink, uncertain what exactly you’re looking at.

“It appears that this particular pen was constructed to entirely isolate the contents from the rest of the ship, and the ship had other ideas.”

You growl harshly at Hal’s emotionless description. “He’s NOT a ship! He’s a troll and deserves to be respected.”

Dirk turns to you with a small headtilt. “Would not his situation mirror my own?”

“I… that…” Color makes your face hot and you glare more at yourself than any of them, acutely aware of their eyes on you. You wish you could say it was different, but it really isn’t. Sollux is as much AI now as Dirk.

“The prudent culmination of this topic seems to be simply that as all helmspersons, troll or otherwise, are capable of independent thought, so too are the ships to which they are bonded.” Equius intones, much to your continued embarrassment.

“Alright! I get it! Fuck. Just get him OUT of it!!” Another circle of looks at you make you huff, as a captain in the Alternian military you cannot admit you were a jackass, but they know that as much as they know that you do know you were a jackass. “Or at least find out what the fuck he was protecting so fucking hard that he let himself fall to the sorry sack of bones and visceral material that he’s become! What the fuck are you waiting for!? Crack the god damned horror box open!”

“As you wish, Captain.”

Equius cracks his knuckles, rolls his shoulders, and aims with one hand splayed out in the center of what used to be the door before Sollux wrapped the thing in sticky biowires. Now the seam is so corroded any other method would likely collapse the whole container. He hauls back like he’s drawing a bow, his clenched fist even with his ear. The sound of the implosion between his knuckles and the metal nearly blows out your auricular sponge clots, the actual hearing membranes that stretch across your balance cartilage. Because he doesn’t actually impact the metal itself, he stops his strike just shy of it, collapsing the space between his knuckles and the container with the speed of his punch. It’s a trick he picked up from a fellow sapphire blood in mechannihilator training.

The creation of a vacuum is what causes the implosion, and the shockwaves break the crusted seal around the door so that Dirk and Nepeta can pry it open. Kanaya revs her chainsaw just in case, but there is silence from within the dark container.

“Oh…” Hal’s deadpan actually adds to the confusion radiating from Dirk.

“Oh no…” Nepeta sounds nearly in tears. “C’mon, can you walk? I know, I know. Shhh. It’ll be okay. You’re among fur-ends again.”

The hand that curls around the edge of the lightless opening is frail, the skin clings to the bones with severe dehydration, and the nails are broken and chipped in ways that some of them have grown in with the ripples of having been peeled back beyond the quick. It shakes a little before tightening on the frame. Pulling chains and the scuff of bare feet on the inside of the cell greet your ears before he’s actually fully visible. He’s stooped, hunched over from sweeps of living in a cell too small for his adult frame, and he squints, not just at the brightness of the hangar, but also because the third lid of his eyes tries to correct his vision. He’s too dehydrated for it to work but it tries anyway. If anything he looks worse off than Sollux, even if he’s been protected. It’s clear that Sollux was siphoning the ship’s power to support him.

“E-Eridan?” You’re struck dumb.

He flinches, earfins attempting a threat display.

There’s a high keen from above you all, and Sollux’s body arches in his bonds. He’s obviously aware that you’ve taken his precious cargo from him, and the dampeners around you light up as psionics arc from the ends of severed biowires.

Roxy’s typing frantically, trying to talk him down, to explain what’s going on, but now he’s screaming through a disused throat.

Eridan blinks again, seems to focus on the fact that there are biowires near his claws such as they are, and begins to climb. In the process you can see how the Loyalists broke him, forced him to put himself back together, and then broke him again. But he scampers like a feral troll up the helmscolumn to hang from Sollux’s shoulders. He drags broken and twisted fingers down Sollux’s cheek and the screaming stops. He hasn’t gone anywhere, he’s just not in the box anymore, and as soon as Sollux knows that, he relaxes in his bonds.

You scramble your pan to form a coherent sentence, and jab your finger at Roxy, “Download that psionic bastard and get them both to Jane! I want comprehensible Alternian from one of them as soon as possible! Something happened here, and they are the only ones who know!”

“Aye, aye, Karky!” She’s glib, but bent over her keyboard with her tongue tucked between her teeth, her fingers flying over her keys so fast they blur together.

Then you leave. You can’t bring yourself to watch your ex tangled up with another troll, and you have a report to file. The Condescension needs to know Goreline did NOT betray the empire as previously thought.

It comes out after a week of treatment in the medbay, Loyalists infiltrated the Odyssey in her maiden voyage and as soon as they were in hyperspeed, they overwhelmed Eridan and his fledgling crew. Capitalizing on the Ampora name and his blood status, they turned his crew into slaves on their own ship, cutting Eridan off from even accessing Sollux by voice. But the blood signature had to be re-acquired at every docking, so the Loyalist captain had him blooded every time they jumped into hyperspace so that on the off chance he did escape his captors, he wouldn’t be able to take control of the ship without risking an unplotted drop out of hyperspeed, liquefying everyone on board and running the chance of appearing inside a star. Or a planet.

After that it wasn’t hard to figure out that Sollux memorized their schedule, and forced a growth of biowires to invade the very pen Eridan was occupying. And from there, Eridan’s blood signature on the ship was simply a matter of overriding the Loyalist commands.

“So why continue attacking the Coalition?” You frown at the written account Jane obtained from Eridan.

“Near as we can figure, they just plum didn’t know how else to get our attention.” She sighs, sympathetic to their plight, and fiddling with the hem of her shirt. “Think they were trying to find you, if I can level with you.”

You blink up at her. “What?”

“No, really. From what Roxy’s been able to glean from your helmsman chap, he was deliberately executing plans he knew would take him close to you. Or at least get your attention.” She looks even more sympathetic—it’s not platonic pity, it’s not! “You should probably give him a visit. He’s a lot more with it lately.”

“Uh. Right. I should. Do that. Probably.” Fuck you sound like Tavros. “Thank you, Jane. I’ll give it some thought. Is that all?”

She tilts her head at you, that small frown on her face. “Get some sleep, Karkat. Doctor’s orders.”

You give her a dismissive nod. You’ll sleep when you’re dead. She sits there for another couple of seconds, watching you pretending to re-read her report, before she exhales with attitude and leaves you to your thoughts.

It takes you another week before you’re ready to see Sollux. They’ve released him from the biowires, but he’s still coon-ridden. He has wasting sores in all of the places he didn’t have biowires inserted under his skin, and he’s barely able to drink water without his body rejecting it after perigees without actual nutrients. But his eyes are bright and focus on you when you walk in the room.

“Well, if it ain’t the high and might thtar captain.” He snarks at you, because his tongue is about the only muscle on his body that isn’t wasted away—though his vocal chords still crackle and squeak from his extended silence.

You scowl, chewing on the inside of the corner of your mouth. Dave does that. When did you pick it up? Ah, no matter, it occupies you as you try to figure out what to say. Really, how do you talk to someone who leaves right after sex only to be panwashed into fusing with a ship and being kidnapped by interstellar terrorists who used his very programming against him?! Seriously!? How. The fuck?!

“You could start with hi, KK.”

“Fuck you! I was getting there!” That little shit!

He smirks at you, and looks back up at the ceiling, even having his head turned that far was too hard. “Same old KK. Asshole.”

“No. No, you do not get to pull that card. The asshole in this room is you. The asshole will recognize his bullshittery and shut up now.”

He just smirks harder. “How ‘bout no?”

You gape at him for a few seconds, scrambling to try and come up with some kind of retort that either won’t completely invalidate the shit he’s gone through, or undermine your position of superior officer. You fail spectacularly.

“How about the self-centered captain with HIC in his back pocket sits down and shuts up while I tell him how he needs to get over himself and learn to let go.” He glances at you, most of the humor drained from him. “Fuck being a fleshbag is exhausting. How the shit do you do it? Don’t answer that.”

Fucking ouch.

For the first time in probably your life and definitely in all of the time you’ve known him, you do exactly as he says. Sitting down on the chair near his bed that you know is reserved specifically for this conversation right here. And almost more to the point; not saying a single fucking word.

“Wow.” He blinks at you, “I didn’t think that would actually work. Careful with that shit, KK, I might get ideas about you actually giving a fuck about me.”

He seems to sense you’re biting your tongue because the sarcastic little laugh he gave dies in his throat. He flicks his fingers against the sheets, almost marveling at the texture.

“So… obviously not panwashed.”

Again you make a sort of growled complaint with your tongue forcibly between your teeth.

“Aw fuck, KK, I know I was an asshole. I should have listened to you and shouldn’t have left, and as soon as HIC knew I had she practically ordered me to write to you. But that was when you and Strider went public and I didn’t wanna fuck shit up for you again. Especially not after that shit with Rufioh and… what was the human? The one that was—”

“Mal. Captain Mal. They cut his run short. Something about a lack of funding?” You mostly rumble to yourself because he was a kick ass captain and you’re pretty sure if he’d still been around Rufioh might have survived.

“Right. Still. Was fucking bullshit.” He lisps. “I followed it, mostly the reports Psi processed for HIC but y’know they usually had me manning the ship back then.”

“Wait, what?!” You blink. “You trained literally under the empress and her helmsman, The Helmsman?!”

“Fuckin’ right I did.” He’s smug again, grinning at you with that mouth of his. “Always told you I was fucking special.”

You can’t. You literally can’t. You’ve been really good about keeping your opinions to yourself so far, but that just crosses the line. “Never needed biowires to prove that to me.”

It’s his turn to blink.

“I mean you were always fucking special. It’s why I wanted to keep you at home.” You look at him, and you know he’s trying to get a grip on the bright red of your eyes—he’s always been fascinated by them. “As worried as I was about you getting panwashed, you know I was full of shit. And I knew you were going to fly through the program. Leave all the other psionic assholes in your dust. It’s always been about knowing the Loyalists know the same fucking shit I do, and we thought… well, Dualscar was in quads with Garfit before the first fall. So it wasn’t hard to connect, or at least, the logic made sense. And the last thing I wanted was to have to fucking cut you out of some Loyalist bastard’s ship.”

“Oh.” is all he says.

Tense silence hangs between you for the moment, and it finally dawns on you that your whole life is punctuated by silences. Endless red miles of speech and the parts that mean the most are silent. You’ve gotten really good at saying exactly what you mean. And the weight of it, the punctuation of it, you see it impact him. Yes you still love him, you’re troll enough to say that, but he has a LONG road ahead of him, one that you have realized you cannot be a part of.

It’s freeing.

“I’m glad they took care of you.” You smile, genuinely happy. “They’re on their way to pick up both you and Eridan. And I’m impressed you made it out of that flying deathtrap in more or less one piece because I did worry about you, you little shit. So it’s comforting to know that you’ll be in good hands to recover from everything.”

You stand and he’s speechless.

“Wait. KK?”

“Hm?”

“That’s… you’re really just gonna…” He sounds almost lost.

“No. The best care you can get to put everything behind you is with Condy.” You give his hand a squeeze. “And I’m troll enough to admit that out loud. The Black Curtain is no place for your recovery. Take care, Odyssey. I look forward to flying with you.”

He settles back against his pillows, though whether that’s because he understands you’re letting him go, or because he doesn’t have the strength to fight to stay you aren’t sure. So you give him another reassuring squeeze and let go deliberately, a physical reinforcement of your message.

You can’t hold onto him forever. You have a ship to run, a crew to support. The empire doesn’t stop for any troll, not even one as special as him. And the crew of the I.C.S. Black Curtain never knows when you’ll be called back to the front line. The Loyalists aren’t gone just because you took out one of their most powerful ships. So, you leave him there, processed and healing, ready to be transferred to better hands.

You have to prepare for the empress’ arrival.


End file.
